Platform, Platform, Platform

I read a lot of kid lit blogs, including many that feature interviews with industry professionals of all sorts. One of the most common questions in these interviews is some variation on this theme: how important is it for writers to develop an online platform? In this usage, "platform" describes having an online presence via the full range of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Most of the writers who appear on these blogs or maintain them by definition have said platform. However, agents and editors answer the question in radically different ways: some say platform is essential to getting published and then selling books; others don't really value platform and reply that writers should spend their time writing.

I've always liked the second answer, partly because I'd rather spend my time writing and partly because I find daunting the prospect of developing an active online presence for myself as a fiction writer. Yet, I've noticed that more and more of these industry professionals are extolling the value of platform, some with great enthusiasm, others only grudgingly. Like it or not, we writers need to be available online for others in the industry and for our readers. The theory is that without the platform there will never be any readers.

If book signings and school visits were once the way many children's authors spread the word about their books, then virtual versions of those events can only spread the word to a wider audience. Moreover, no one's going to invite me for a school visit until my book has been published, but I can blog about my book right now. Maybe a handful of people follow my blog. They like what they read. They tell some friends or ping back. More people read my blog. Suddenly, there is a community following my book before it's even available to read. This is a good thing, I think.

So, I do think writers should spend their time writing, but hanging out online building a platform can't hurt, might help, and, at the very least, is more social than writing, which is so very solitary. Thus, I plan to make this blog more active. As a platform, it's been a piece of particle board that I left out in the yard through a few rain storms, but I'll toss some cinder blocks under it, reinforce the wood, and see what happens.

Queen Victoria and Blogging

Today was the first day of classes this semester at Bucknell, and I met both my classes: Victorian Literature and Culture in the morning and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers in the afternoon. The C19 Women Writers is an advanced seminar and so I asked them to do a short reading assignment for the first day of class: the aim being to introduce stereotypes and immediately break them down and thus elevate our discussion from the get go. To this end, we read some material by and about Queen Victoria.

Victoria is a fascinating figure in many ways, but for the purposes of this class, I wanted us to focus on the fact that while we might imagine most Victorian women resented the restrictions placed on them by society, Victoria, the one women who could have thrown off those restrictions, chose to live with them, chose to subordinate herself to her husband, chose a simple, middle-class, domestic life.

The conversation went in a direction I didn't anticipate, though. We talked about how difficult it is to know what she really wanted or felt or even what her life was really like. Her image was carefully managed and probably carefully constructed, so even when we read her private letters to her daughter, we can detect her awareness of her image and observe how she manages that image.

And this is where blogging comes in. A blog, in my view, is an odd form at once private and public. That is, we write blogs hoping they will be read not just by friends but probably also by strangers, yet in tone and content they are often cousins to the journal or to the old-fashioned letter. As I write this now, I am pretty sure no one will read it, but when I am finished, I will click "publish post" and doing so is an acknowledgement that I am making this post public. Someone might read it. Victoria wrote letters to her daughter first and foremost for her daughter, but given her position and her evident media savvy, she likely anticipated that her letters would one day be published. So her private correspondence is haunted by the prospect of becoming public, and so she surely must have modulated her comments, her attitudes, her image with that prospect in mind.

A blogger must be sympathetic to her plight, a writer who crafts personal sentences in a space that appears private but is really public. I am appreciating for the first time what a peculiar genre a blog post is, and it is Queen Victoria who illuminated this peculiarity for me.